This invention relates in general to life testing applications, and more particularly to tests designed to gain an understanding of the probabilistic properties of a component or a system of components.
Consider an existing component, process, or a pharmaceutical drug with a fully specified lifetime distribution function F(x). Should an improved component, process, or pharmaceutical drug come along, both producers and consumers would like to verify that the new item compares favorably to the existing item, most often by determining if its mean lifetime has decreased or increased.
In the life testing of the new component, it would be highly desirable, in terms of money and time, to stop the test when enough evidence exists to support a claim that the mean lifetime has either decreased or increased. Such censoring, commonly called Type I (stop after time t) or Type II (stop after r items fail), can produce statistical inference. However, existing methods are not widely known, nor do they have remarkable statistical power.